The Penny Pinchers Club (6 page)

Not having to open those envelopes and face those numbers was worth tolerating Griff ’s monthly third degree. Even so, I was sure he would have said something about getting a new credit card.

“What’s wrong?” Viv asked, peering.

“We don’t have a MasterCard.”

“Really? You know how you are with things like this. Need I mention the red sofa?”

I once hid three months of credit card bills in the seat cushions of our red sofa back when I was deranged with postpartum depression—just so I wouldn’t have to listen to Griff go off on how I’d spent $400 on a Peg Perego baby stroller even though at that price it was a total steal. I would not call it one of my finest moments.

“I’m almost positive.”

She inhaled deeply and shifted gears into her familiar role of all-knowing big sister.

“Look, Kat, you have many fine qualities, but reading financial statements is not one of them. We need an expert to go through all your records with a fine-tooth comb and do a quick audit to see if Griff ’s been running up any other secret expenses.”

“He has not been running up secret expenses. He’s not like that. He’s a tightwad.”

She ignored this and made a suggestion she knew would not go over well. “We need to bring in Adele.”

Ugh.

Adele was part of Viv’s “single clique” of wronged women who traveled en masse to places like Orlando and Costa Rica and TGI Friday’s, where they took lots of photos of themselves with their arms around one another, hoisting margaritas and pink Cosmopolitans. She was also an accountant and a stranger to Griff. I could not believe Vivian was serious about having Adele go over our personal stuff.

“I am not bringing in Adele. That’s a violation of our marriage.”

“Is it not more of a violation of your marriage,” she said, “to be sleeping with one’s young nubile research assistant?”

Viv’s clear eyes, rimmed with bright aqua liner to better highlight her beautiful blue irises, were unflinching. She had taken me to my first Peter Frampton concert and had told me how to French-kiss (coincidentally, the same night!). And no one could make you feel better about having gained five pounds.

But there were times when she pushed too hard.

“You
want
Griff to be cheating on me, don’t you?”

“No!” She gasped in shock. “No! All I want is to make sure you don’t end up like Beth Williams.”

She’d played the trump card.

Beth Williams’s husband, Bernie, a lawyer, had planned his exit from their marriage with Machiavellian precision. He’d left scattered evidence of an affair around their house so brazenly that Beth was forced to ask for a divorce. Unfortunately, she made the mistake of not waiting to ask until their tenth anniversary, thereby allowing her husband to get off without a penny of alimony—as he’d planned. As a result, she was forced to take two jobs, working as a dental hygienist during the day and stocking shelves at Wegmans at night, just to be able to keep her kids in the family home.

The very mention of Beth Williams could strike terror in the hearts of Rocky River women everywhere.

“Okay.” I pushed power again on the washing machine. “Do whatever you want. Call Adele. Call in Price Waterhouse, for all I care. Spend this whole beautiful late-summer day in my dark basement rifling through Griff ’s files and adding up figures. I know he’s not having an affair.”

Viv said, “You won’t regret it.”

I thought
, I bet I will
.

And I was right.

CHAPTER FOUR

D
id I mention the discovery of the Mint Tingle Trojans happened the day before our twentieth wedding anniversary? It did.

That’s why Griff rushed home from San Francisco: so we could celebrate—and I could throw him a surprise party. I even got Bree to plead an unexpected research glitch so he’d go to the office that day and leave me alone. Which he did with more willingness than I’d have expected.

And now I knew why. Talk about giving comfort to the enemy. I might as well have bought them a hotel room. Wives really are the last to find out.

No. I was not going to let myself turn into a shrill harpy just because Vivian had planted her seed of doubt. I had to stick to the facts and wait for Adele to find discrepancies in our credit card statements—the only valid indicators of male infidelity, according to my sister and her divorced friends.

So, while Viv was on the phone chitchatting to Adele about “poor Kat,” and how I couldn’t read a financial statement “if it were drawn in big red crayon letters with cartoon illustrations,” I went to smear on a swath of neutral mauve lipstick and brush my hair in the downstairs bathroom in an effort to buck up.

But it was so hard to tamp down those insecurities. What if what Vivian said turned out to be true? Was our relationship really in such shambles that Griff had to go rushing into the arms of someone like Bree? Or was it . . . me?

Couldn’t be. My figure hadn’t gone completely to pot. Sure, my breasts weren’t full and bouncy with that perky great-to-meet-you attitude they’d sported in their twenties. Nursing and an aversion to exercise will do that. But my hair was still blond(ish). And after professional bleaching by Beth Williams herself, my teeth were whiter.

I pulled back my lips and checked them like a horse up for auction. Yep. Still white.

Anyway, this was stupid. Griff and I were beyond breast shape and whether his abs had gone from six-pack to half dozen. (They hadn’t, curse him.) We were a team. We were each other’s confidantes who held hands in line at the movies and loved nothing more than to curl up in bed on a Sunday night and watch a PBS mystery, our toes playing tootsie, Griff every once in a while mindlessly planting a kiss on the top of my head.

Did he do that with . . .
her
?

It was beginning to eat at me from within—the creeping feeling of betrayal and disloyalty, how it acted like dry rot, ruining a perfectly fine foundation from underneath. So this was why adultery was so insidious. It wasn’t just the act of Griff having sex with another woman, it was all the whispering machinations that made the adultery justifiable. His gripes to her about me. His girlfriend’s strokes of consolation, having heard only his side of the story.

After all, no man starts off an affair by proclaiming his wife is his soul mate who is understanding and still outrageously sexy. An affair begins with dissatisfaction, with a complaint. So what was Griff ’s beef? What, exactly, had he told
her
about our private life? That I shopped too much? That I turned a deaf ear to his views on the Fed? Give me a break. There were worse crimes than growing bored with rants about Alan Greenspan.

My eyes hurt and I realized crying was inevitable. It was going to happen and it was going to be bad. Just when I needed to be strong and optimistic, my glands were turning traitor.

Halfway through a deep and wrenching sob, there was a knock on the bathroom door. I lifted my swollen red face to the mirror.

“Kat?” Vivian cooed. “Are you okay?”

“Just fine!” My shaking voice indicated quite the opposite. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

“Could you make it sooner? There’s some kind of incident going on in the driveway.”

A whiff of Basic cigarettes floated through the window and I thought—Saturday. Quarter after ten. Driveway. Jasper.

Uh-oh.

Throwing open the bathroom door, I grabbed Griff ’s shirts for the dry cleaner, tossed my keys in my purse, and flew outside. As I feared, my cleaning woman, Libby, in green knit shorts and a blue tank top, her anchor tattoo visible on her upper left shoulder, was leaning against her pickup truck, a smoldering cigarette in one hand, a black can of Mace in the other.

“I told you I was coming at ten,” she scolded. “Why you didn’t lock that beast in the basement is beyond me.”

I eyed the “beast” Jasper, whose gray muzzle lay between his two arthritic paws. He arched an eyebrow in my direction, glanced at the Mace pointed at him, and sighed. Talk about misunderstood.

“He’s something like ninety-two in dog years.” I slipped a finger under his collar and gently brought him to his feet.

“I don’t care. He hates me. If you weren’t around, he’d bite off my ankle.”

“No, he wouldn’t. He hardly has any teeth left.” But there was no point in explaining that to Libby, who’d been cleaning my house for fifteen years—about as long as we’d had Jasper. She hated all dogs, and all dogs hated her. If Vivian hadn’t fetched me, she would have doused the old boy in pepper spray and probably given him a heart attack.

I put Jasper in the garage and closed the door.
Sorry
, I mouthed to him.

“By the way,” she said, biting the cigarette as she fetched her mop and pail from the back of her truck,“I went shopping with my group this morning and picked up a few things on sale for your party.”

By “group,” Libby meant the Penny Pinchers, a bunch of super savers like her who met in the basement of the Rocky River Public Library once a week to swap coupons and trade tips. You’d have thought the Penny Pinchers were A-list celebrities the way she was forever going on about their crazy antics, recounting their great finds at yard sales and their coups at the grocery store beating the system, ticking off the store managers and filling their shopping carts with loads of free stuff.

She tried to get me to come to a couple of meetings, but so far I’d managed to duck her. It wasn’t that I didn’t
want
to learn how to save, it was just that I wasn’t sure I
could
. My few attempts at living by a budget in the past had been utter, costly failures.

Take coupons, for example. I’d usually start off gung ho, buying a bunch of Sunday newspapers and cutting out each coupon, filing them by category in long white envelopes. Inevitably, though, I’d forget the envelopes when I went grocery shopping or I’d hold on to the coupons too long. They’d expire and fall to the bottom of my purse, where they’d become ripped or crumpled until I used them to hold spit-out gum or to pat my lipstick. Not to pun, but some of us were just not cut out for coupons.

Libby handed me a dozen used Ball jelly jars and a bag of tiny votive candles.

“Thank you,” I said, grateful, if slightly confused. Along with not clipping coupons, I wasn’t a canner, either.

“Lights for the patio. Very pretty with the glass quilting.” She exhaled her cigarette triumphantly. “I got them at a yard sale this morning. Guess how much.”

Libby loved to play the home version of
The Price Is Right
.

“Five dollars.”

“For free!” She pumped her fist. “It was the end of the sale and they couldn’t get rid of them, so they threw them in when I bought a towel rack for thirty-five cents. The candles were left over from Christmas last year. I picked them up at a post-holiday steal down at the drugstore for a buck a bag. Now you won’t have to go out and drop a Ulysses S. Grant on lanterns.”

She opened the candles and plopped one into a jar, lighting it with her cigarette. Although it was still daylight, I could see the candle’s potential as the flame danced in the puckered glass.

“Hey. That’s very pretty!”

“Isn’t it?” She gazed at the jar with pride until her hand began to shake. “And . . . hot.
Ohmigod.
”

Quickly, I snatched it from her hand and blew out the flame while Libby waved her red palm in the cooling air. “I thought they’d be insulated,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s what quilting means.”

I took the Ball jars and candles to the patio. Then I dumped Griff ’s shirts in the backseat of the Lexus, started the car, and headed toward Chloe’s office, though it was Saturday and the day of the anniversary party. When Chloe summons, one comes.

Griff calls Rocky River “New Jersey’s Brigadoon” because it’s hidden between New Brunswick and Princeton, off Route 27, in the valley marked by a wooden bridge. It was love at first sight when Griff and I, house hunting, stumbled upon this community with its little shops, the hardware store and local ice-cream parlor, its white clapboard town hall and annual Fourth of July parades. Right off, I knew we’d found our home.

After picking up a triple venti latte with a blueberry scone at Starbs, I drove down to Princeton and parked my Lexus in its usual space next to Chloe’s all-white Mercedes. Sitting in my car, I tried to reach Griff at his various numbers—home, office, cell—again. And
again
, I was sent directly to voice mail, just like when I attempted to reach him in San Francisco.

An inner voice whispered,
Your marriage is in trouble.

Be quiet, you
, I whispered back, tossing my phone into my purse and heading to work. Honestly, my inner voice had no idea when to shut up. So rude!

Interiors by Chloe was on the first floor of the Stevens Building, across the hall from Arthur B. Winchester Properties, where my friend Elaine was one of two real estate agents. When she wasn’t scrolling the Internet, she was lounging on Chloe’s soft couches and flipping through our copies of
Town & Country
, which is exactly what she was doing when I opened the door and found her bare feet on the antique coffee table, a bag of Oreos in her lap.

“Shoot.” She sat back and closed her eyes, placing a hand on her rather ample chest. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought you were Chloe.”

I put the Starbucks on my desk and dropped my keys. “Do you know what she would have done if she’d caught you like this?”

Elaine brushed the crumbs off the unflattering navy pantsuit Arthur B. Winchester insisted she wear and collected them on the magazine. “You know what? After what I’ve been through, I’m not sure I’d care.” Carrying the magazine over to a wastepaper basket, she dumped in the crumbs and said, “Got a call from the cops at two A.M. this morning. Taylor was rounded up in an underage drinking party.”

“You’re kidding me.” I slumped at my desk and popped open the Starbucks. Elaine had three sons, two of whom were star athletes and students. It was as though Taylor, the youngest, was trying to make up for the older two by skipping school, drinking, and repeatedly getting in trouble with the authorities. “What are they going to do?”